Loch K. Johnson has been studying oversight since the 1970s, when he served as the special assistant to Senator Frank Church (D-ID) on the committee investigating the intelligence community over a range of alleged misdeeds. For decades he has wrestled with the problem of holding secret agencies publicly accountable. Government transparency must be the default position in a democracy, but intelligence agencies require secrecy in order to function effectively. Balancing accountability and effectiveness is difficult for any country with a dedicated intelligence bureaucracy. In Spy Watching, Johnson evaluates how well the United States has struck the balance.
The book is ambitious. It includes a theoretical overview of accountability, along with a sweeping history of U.S. intelligence oversight. It covers a number of issues, including intelligence collection, analysis, covert action, and counterintelligence. Johnson sprinkles the narrative with his own experiences and observations, along with interviews with intelligence officials. And he pulls no punches in his summary judgment. While oversight has improved since the creation of the Senate and House intelligence committees in the 1970s, members of Congress have often failed to investigate the intelligence community with the same vigor as Church’s, and they have been far too quiescent over the last two decades, as the intelligence community embarked on “the era of mass surveillance” (p. 171).
The theoretical heart of the book is in Chapters 6–8, where Johnson discusses the “shock theory” of intelligence oversight. Oversight usually resembles what Matthew McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz call the “police-patrolling” style of oversight. But major intelligence failures or scandals shock them into a burst of “firefighting.” They go beyond routine monitoring and engage in serious and critical examination of what went wrong, with the hopes that they can reform the community and prevent future breakdowns. What follows is a period of intense patrolling, which becomes less intense over time, until another shock forces their attention. The cycle repeats.
Johnson argues that the media are essential for stimulating oversight. Some threshold of sustained media attention is necessary to spur overseers into action. That threshold is straightforward: “fifty articles, all relatively concentrated in time” (p. 271). The expanding media environment begs the question of whether this number is still meaningful, however. Johnson’s standard may have been appropriate when there were just a handful of national newspapers, before the advent of cable news and social media. What counts as sustained media attention today is unclear, given the extraordinary scope and pace and volume of news.
Crossing the media threshold is necessary but not sufficient to stimulate a thorough congressional investigation. Johnson suggests that the timing and nature of the scandal also matter. If the issue is too narrow, for instance, it is unlikely to generate sustained attention on Capitol Hill. He analyzes the difference between scandals by way of comparative historical vignettes, but the book would benefit from more theoretical treatment of these variables, which seem to be the critical mechanisms that transform media coverage to congressional scrutiny.
Above all, the personality of overseers determines the strength of oversight. Johnson provides a simple typology. “Ostriches” (Chapter 8) pay little attention to their role, treating intelligence agencies with benign neglect. “Cheerleaders” are aggressive advocates of the intelligence community. “Lemon-suckers” see the profession of intelligence as suspect, and are reliable cynics about intelligence activities. They take oversight seriously but go in with the assumption that intelligence agencies are up to no good. “Guardians” believe intelligence is vital for national security, but also that intelligence agencies are capable of misdeeds and poor performance if not held accountable. Johnson holds Church up as the guardian exemplar, and urges more members of Congress to live up to his standard.
Other scholars have described why they do not. Brent Durbin’s recent The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform (2017) explains why inertia prevails in the intelligence community. Legislators lack the time, expertise, and political incentives to focus on the complex work of intelligence oversight. Amy Zegart and Julie Quinn have similarly argued that intelligence committee assignments are unappealing for ambitious lawmakers. True guardians are rare for all of these reasons (see Amy Zegart and Julie Quinn, “Congressional Intelligence Oversight: The Electoral Disconnection,” Intelligence and National Security, 25[6], 2010). Johnson alludes to this work but argues that less prominent members of Congress and committee staffers are at least as important for ensuring dedicated oversight. Particularly ambitious members “may be exactly the wrong people to count on for attentive oversight, because they are too busy in chamberwide leadership roles or off running for higher office” (p. 35). Perhaps, but this is puzzling, given that no one was more ambitious than Senator Church, whom Johnson holds up as the ideal.
Johnson’s evaluation of oversight is uneven. His basic finding is that the situation has improved since the high-profile congressional inquiries and reforms of the 1970s. But those changes failed to prevent the litany of subsequent scandals he describes, starting with the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. Moreover, Johnson is at times scathing in his condemnation of congressional oversight after the September 11 attacks, especially on issues regarding domestic surveillance. As he tells it, Congress passed the PATRIOT Act without reading it closely. The George W. Bush administration then expanded domestic collection, surreptitiously, but Congress did little to stop it even after it got wise. The Senate intelligence committee’s investigation into alleged CIA torture was a rare exception to the rule.
One reason why Johnson’s conclusion seems inconsistent with the evidence he presents has to do with how he measures the quality of oversight. If the focus is on process, then the case is straightforward. Clearly, there have been many innovations since the 1970s that have enabled Congress to take a closer look at intelligence activities. Perhaps most important is the creation of full-time professional committee staffers who have the time and mandate to master bureaucratic and budgetary arcana. Other laws have codified Congress’s role, to the chagrin of some presidents who would like a freer hand to use intelligence as a foreign policy instrument. It is tempting to focus on process, because we can describe these new laws and regulations in detail.
If we measure the quality of oversight according to outcomes rather than process, however, the picture is murkier. Johnson’s discussion of factors like media attention and personality suggests that process alone does not tell the whole story. The combination of factors that enable oversight to work—that is, to actually constrain the behavior of intelligence agencies—are formal and informal. Some factors are related to internal processes and some are external both to Congress and the intelligence community. How these come together to influence intelligence judgments, and stop intelligence agencies from misbehavior, remains mysterious. Nonetheless it is possible that oversight succeeds, even if we do not quite know how and why.
Oversight works when nothing happens. Policymakers and intelligence officials exercise restraint, either because they fear congressional scrutiny, or they fear a public scandal or something else. Truly successful oversight narrows the range of actions they might consider in the first place. In this sense, measuring oversight raises the same knotty methodological problems as measuring deterrence. Telling a convincing causal story about a nonevent is inherently difficult, even if the logic is sound. The expanding field of intelligence studies, and the increasing integration of intelligence studies with mainstream political science, makes it likely that enterprising scholars will tackle this problem directly. Spy Watching will prove a valuable resource for their efforts.
